For many people, it can be hard for them to revise their own work because they hold biases about their writing or are unaware of personal mistakes. Asking another person to review your work may help you refine your essay even more. Additionally, having another person read over your essay can help you determine the clarity of your point: do they understand the flow of your piece, or are they confused by any information? Does the context you provide make sense to the overall idea, or does the reader still have questions?
- Your outline should have a logical order that flows from:
- Introduction that ends with a thesis or idea
- Explanation that supports and proves your thesis
- Conclusion that reiterates your argument and thesis
- Properly format your article by following instructions, or (as a general rule) write using:
- 12 point font
- Times New Roman, Arial, Courier, Helvetica, or Georgia font (whatever is standard on your preferred writing system, nothing too stylized)
- Double spaced
- 1 inch to 1 ½ inch margins
- If there is no required word or page count, as a general rule, aim for ¾ to 1 full page in length.
- Be sure to include your name and the name of the scholarship you are applying for near the top of the page (either as a header or simply above the optional title).
Scholarships are a form of student financial aid that do not require repayment, as long as you meet the terms of the award and use it as directed. They are often gifted based on merit, either through academic excellence, financial need (also known as “need-based” aid), or by meeting specific requirements set by the organization awarding the scholarship
As important as FAFSA is for most students, there are other options available to help students pay for their college education: mainly scholarships and grants. The best thing about these options? They don’t require repayment plans.
Scholarship Essay Tips
Both grants and scholarships may require an accompanying essay with the application, although there are some rare cases of scholarships and grants that don’t require essays and are easier to obtain. Be cautious of fraudulent scholarships or online scams associated with “easy to obtain scholarships”, as they are becoming increasingly common online.
In general, spending time away from your work can help you clear your mind. When you do come back, you may be more likely to notice mistakes or see gaps which require elaboration. For any essay you write, this is always a helpful tip.
Writing an imaginative and thoughtful scholarship essay can help you pay for online schooling for either a bachelors or masters degree program. It can also get you started on the right foot to have a solid financial aid foundation to pursue your college dreams.
Once you’ve brainstormed and outlined your article, you can officially start writing the piece. Be sure to follow your outline and cover all of the key ideas that you came up with while brainstorming. Be concise, avoid rambling, and ensure your point is clearly stated. Also ensure you’ve formatted your essay correctly and stay true to the word or page count, if applicable.
Wait: I can do that? I can use an essay I’ve already written or write one that works for lots of different scholarships and then just submit the same essay?
Her essay follows this simple structure: a) What challenge did you face? b) What did you do about it? c) What did you learn? If you are writing about challenges, you can use this simple structure as well.
Next, brainstorm values that might not normally be associated with football or a mission trip.
Get this: Going Merry let me know in a recent conversation that more than 15% of the scholarships on their site went unclaimed last year.
The Top 10 Most Common Scholarship Essay Prompts:
What are colleges and organizations looking for in a scholarship essay?
This structure was inspired by an article by Andy Raskin in which he analyzes a pitch Elon Musk gave on the Powerwall. Here’s Raskin's take on Musk’s pitch:
Submit your essay (and any other required documents) before the deadline.
Once you actually start writing, it’s important to follow the formal rules of essay composition. Remember the class you took on how to structure an essay? Do that. Is your grammar correct? Are you using paragraphs properly? Did you proofread for typos? Imagine that you’re turning in the essay to be graded.
“Are you nervous or scared?”These questions were asked of me in the eighth grade, a time when all of my conversations with peers were centered around high school. I knew that this question, asked by a close friend, had a hidden message that she was unwilling to say. Unluckily, others were undeterred by the need for tact.“Are you afraid you’re going to get shot?”This question was asked because of the school I was assigned to attend. West Charlotte High School was known for being low performing, crime-ridden, and segregated by race and class. West Charlotte was unlike any school I had attended. I have witnessed multiple students getting dragged out of the cafeteria in handcuffs or surrounded by cops on campus for dubious suspicions of crimes. My peers have been subjected to baseless bag checks in the middle of class. I can recall countless times when student movement has been prohibited on campus due to threats to our safety. During a rare field trip opportunity, my peers and I were followed by a dozen police officers because we looked “suspicious.” In the classroom, we experience inferior conditions when compared to students at different schools in our district. Few advanced courses are offered, and teacher turnover is rampant as educators quickly become frustrated with the conditions of our school.I knew that I wanted to change the circumstances around me. First, I strove to be a model student. I took advantage of the limited course offerings at my school and filled my schedule with International Baccalaureate classes. As an IB ambassador I prepare underclassmen to do the same. Next, I wrote about my experiences of educational inequity in the largest publication in the Carolinas. My writing has brought me to the stage of the largest theater in Charlotte. I have represented my peers on several news platforms. I have spoken on panels with Board of Education members, civil rights activists, local politicians, and leaders of educational organizations such as Teach For America. As a speaker for the local organization Community Building Initiative, I promote partnerships between companies and Title I schools. All of this work is fueled by my desire to create a more equitable education system.While I am proud to be a representative of my school, I know that most of my peers also have compelling stories to tell. This year, I established my school’s student-led newspaper. This newspaper has given my peers a place to share their creative writing and art. I also include a student assignment spotlight, to ensure that my peers are getting recognition for their hard work in the classroom. This newspaper encourages my peers to develop their writing skills and identify their academic interests. I take pride in knowing that my contribution has shown my peers that they have powerful voices that deserve to be heard. Obtaining higher education will allow me to continue uplifting voices and fighting for educational equity in a professional setting.
In the second paragraph, Keniece describes the obstacles she’s overcome:
Keniece’s essay proves that a good scholarship essay depends on two things: the candidate’s qualifications, and the candidate’s ability to communicate those qualifications. Keniece is exactly the type of candidate we were looking for, and her essay provided all the material we needed to see that.
Examples of scholarship essays that won
This might go without saying, but you’re never going to win a scholarship if you don’t put the effort in. If your essay isn’t going to stand out, it’s not worth submitting, so max out the word limit. If you don’t, you’re wasting opportunities to convince the review committee that you’re the right person to receive the award. (And make no mistake, other candidates will be using all of that space to make the case for themselves.)
For the OppU Achievers Scholarship, we ask applicants to tell us about what makes them an achiever. What we’re looking for essentially breaks down into three components:
Instead of applying for a slew of scholarships that don’t match up with your particular talents, focus your efforts on the select few that do. (Find them by using any of the popular scholarship sites.) You’ll save yourself a lot of wasted effort, and you’ll free yourself up to devote extra attention to the scholarships that offer you the best chance of success.
I’ve danced ballet since I was seven-years-old. But, even after almost eight years, I could still barely extend my legs as high as my peers nor could do as many pirouettes as them. My flexibility was incredibly subpar and I easily wore out my Pointe shoes, making them unwearable after a couple of months. Where the average lifespans of my peers’ pointe shoes extended into months, mine could barely last ten classes. I was the weakling of my class at Ballet Etudes, and I was too absorbed in my insecurities to do anything to better myself to become the dancer I aspired to be.After a humiliating recital, wherein my pointe shoe ribbons untied in the middle of our group performance, I all but gave up on dance. I was in the middle of doing a Changement de Pieds (Change of feet jumping step) when I glanced down in horror to see my beautiful ribbons untied as I forgot to tape them with clear tape as I usually did before my performances. Glancing to my right, I saw that my ballet teacher backstage had also taken note and was rushing me to get off the stage, her hands beckoning me in a frantic manner. After berating me for not having properly tied my laces, I was not allowed to finish my part. Later, I could barely get back on stage that evening for our final performance as I didn’t want to fail myself and my team again. But, because of my move to Port Saint Lucie in the summer before sophomore year, I was able to rekindle my passion for ballet and pointe at South Florida Dance Company. South Florida Dance Company was my saving grace, a place where I was able to restart my experiences in dance and renew the joy I once felt in my art. It was an incredible feeling regaining my confidence and surety in my abilities, as a result of the additional help that I received from my dance teacher, Ms. Amanda.Presently, I always remind myself to be the best that I can be and to positively use my dance role models, like Misty Copeland, as encouragement to be a better dancer. From this experience, I learned that to overcome personal failures, I needed to move forward and think positively because change doesn’t happen when you sit still.
Filling out this application, and my college applications, has forced me to face head on the realities that I've grown up in. Looking back and describing my life I see all the ways in which I am disadvantaged due to my socioeconomic status. But I think it's important to note that I wasn't fully aware of any of it growing up. I knew that my parents couldn't buy me everything, but I also knew that they hardly ever said no. I was a very normal child, asking for chicken nuggets and looking at mom and dad any time I was scared or unsure of something. As I've grown I've learned to fight my own monsters but I now also battle the ones that frighten my parents, the monsters of a world that they weren't born into. Monsters of doubt and disadvantage that try to keep them stuck in a cycle of povertyPrompt: Please explain a personal hardship or catastrophic life event that you have experienced. How did you manage to overcome this obstacle? What did you learn and how did you grow from it? This answer is critical to your application as Change a Life Foundation’s vision is to assist individuals who have persevered and overcome a hardship/catastrophic life event.
Fund for Education Abroad Rainbow Scholarship $7,500 by Steven Fisher
Scholarship Essay Example #9
Pro Tip: Write a great college essay and re-use it when writing scholarship essays for similar prompts.
Prompt: The Fund for Education Abroad is committed to diversifying education abroad by providing funding to students who are typically under-represented in study abroad. Please describe how you and/or your plans for study abroad could be viewed as under-represented.
These students earned thousands in financial aid and I’m sharing these sample scholarship essays so you can learn from what they did well.
“Oh well look at that one,” my uncle leans over and says about my brother-in-law in the living room wearing a dress. “I’d always had my suspicions about him,” he jokes with a disapproving sneer and leans back in his chair, a plate of Southern-style Christmas dinner in his hand.I was hurt. Why would my own uncle say that like it’s such a terrible thing that my brother-in-law is wearing a dress? That it was the worst thing in the world if my brother-in-law were gay or effeminite.“I think he looks beautiful,” my oldest brother Ethan chimes in. At that moment, I wish I could have hugged Ethan. No, not because he was defending my brother-in-law (who actually isn’t gay, as my uncle was suggesting), but because Ethan was defending me. My uncle has no idea that I recognized earlier this past year that heterosexuality wasn’t meeting all of my needs for intimacy with other people and that I’ve come to define myself as queer. It all started when I took a hard look at how my upbringing in Miami had taught me that the only way that boys are supposed to connect with others is by having sex with “beautiful” girls – that intimacy with other guys or “ugly” girls isn’t as meaningful.After freeing up that block in my brain that told me that I shouldn’t look at guys in a certain way, I could embraced the fact that I’m attracted to men (and people in general) in a lot of different, new ways. My growth as a person was exponential. I rewrote so many areas of my life where I didn’t do things I wanted because of social conditioning. Within two months, my world expanded to include polyamory. I looked back on my past relationship with my girlfriend and realized that I wasn’t jealous (angry, yes. hurt, yes. But not jealous) when she cheated on me. I realized that people’s needs — whether they are for sex, someone to talk to, someone to engage intellectually — don’t necessarily all have to be met with one person. It can be easier sometimes with one person, absolutely. But that’s not the only way. As someone who is both polyamorus and queer, I feel like parts of my family and large parts of my community marginalize me for being different because society has told them to. I want to change that.Since I will be studying for an entire year in Prague, I will have the opportunity to attend the annual Mezipatra, an international film festival in November that screens around a hundred top-ranking films on lesbian, bisexual, transsexual and queer themes. I feel really connected to going to this event because I crave being in an environment of like-minded people who strive to do that same thing I want to: balance the images of people typically portrayed through cliché and stereotype.When I came out to my sister-in-law, she told me that people who are really set in their ways are more likely to be tolerant to different kinds of people after having relationships with these people. If my uncle can learn to love me, to learn to love one queer/poly person, he can learn to love them all. If I can be an example to my family, I can be an example to my classmates. If I can get the opportunity to travel abroad, I can be an example to the world. Not just through my relationships, but through my art. Give me a camera and a screen and I will carry the message of tolerance from the audiences of Mezipatra in Prague to my parent’s living room.Fade in: Two men with thick beards kiss – maybe for once they aren’t wearing colorful flamboyant clothing. Fade in: A woman leaves her house to go to her male best friend’s house and her husband honestly tells her to enjoy herself. Fade in: A college student wanting to study abroad tells his conservative parents the truth…
The most common scholarship prompts ask you to write about yourself or the field of study you want to apply. These prompts help the scholarship committee learn about you as a person and your goals for the degree. We have carefully chosen the essay examples given below to guide you on how you can efficiently display yourself.
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According to a research study, many competent students in the United States never apply for a master’s degree due to financial problems. Even after giving remarkable performance during college education, they can’t pursue their master’s degree. The scholarship is an opportunity for such needy students who have extraordinary academic records and want to get higher education.
If you have already written your essay but not sure if it is worth submitting or not, then you can also contact us. Our writers will improve the quality of your essay and give the finishing touches to make sure it is free of mistakes. Making your essay free from grammatical and punctuation errors is important to make an impression on the reader’s mind.
Good Scholarship Essay Examples
The world looks for future leaders in today’s students, so are the college admission officers. A scholarship essay about leadership prompt is intended to see what kind of leadership qualities you possess.
Scholarships are mostly required for college education as they are more expensive than high school. Many college students work part-time jobs to cope with financial needs and support their families. This results in bad academic performance and poor grades, as they do not have enough time to study. Scholarship opportunities are a kind of blessing in disguise for such students.
Mostly, the essay prompts are given because the scholarship committee specifically needs answers to those questions. They wanted to get to know you better, so they provide you with the explicit prompts you need to address. The most common scholarship essay prompts are as follow:
You can write your essay without following guidelines and examples, but are you sure that your essay will grant you the aid? Do you have the confidence that your essay is impressive enough that it will definitely get you the financial aid?
